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The Path to the Kremlin Judy Yandoh LAIS 409 July 30 2018

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The Path to the Kremlin Judy Yandoh LAIS 409 July 30 2018 The Path to the Kremlin Judy Yandoh LAIS 409 July 30 2018 Recent biographies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin illuminate their path to the Kremlin and how they became rulers of the once Soviet Union and now Russia. For all three men the path from the provinces (in Putin’s case St. Petersburg) to Moscow is similar. A combination of the patronage of powerful men in the Kremlin from their provinces, the exchange of favors with Kremlin functionaries, and personalities and characteristics admired by influential men brought Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin to power. In her book about life in Russia during the 1930’s, Shelia Fitzpatrick wrote: In the Soviet Union, for all its apparent bureaucratization, many things actually functioned on a personal basis… To get privileges, you needed contacts with someone higher up: in short you needed a patron. Patronage relations were ubiquitous in Soviet society. The practice of patronage… was characteristic… of all Soviet leaders… They all tried to have “their own” people working for them – people who were personally loyal, associate their interests with their boss’s, relied on him as a patron… In the Soviet system status and power was “inseparable from the man in charge”. Those in power surrounded themselves with “family”, “political clients, subordinates, and associates from whom they expected loyalty…” and in return offered them privileges and protection. Fitzpatrick also described blat, a system of exchanging favors in the Soviet Union based on the principle of reciprocity. Blat was usually described in terms of friends helping friends but really meant “… you had to have something for somebody in return”. Obtaining shoes, clothes, a better work assignment, university admission, supplies for a factory… was facilitated by blat. One hand washed the other.1 1 Shelia Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999) pp. 32, 62-65, 108-109. 1 Fitzpatrick’s description of patronage and “favor” sharing in Stalin’s Russia was the same system that helped bring Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin to power. By understanding how they reached the Kremlin it becomes clear that Putin’s rise to become Russia’s president was not the result of an “accident of fate” or a scheme by Russia’s security services or even surprising. Instead he followed a time-honored path to power. Mikhail Gorbachev was born and raised in a small village in the Stavropol Region of the North Caucus in the former Soviet Union. There he began his climb through the region’s Communist party ranks. His rise was facilitated by Fyodor Kulakov, the First Secretary of the Stavropol Region’s Communist Part from 1960-1964. In 1961 he promoted Gorbachev to lead Stavropol’s regional Komsomol and continued to promote him through regional party ranks. The Stavropol Region is blessed with numerous health spas and resorts featuring mineral and medicinal waters, and healing mud baths. During the Soviet period Communist party leaders and high level government officials from Moscow regularly vacationed in Stavropol. Gorbachev as part of his party duties would make it a point to greet visiting dignitaries. This is how he met Yuri Andropov in 1969, who was also from Stavropol and was then Chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB), when he was vacationing with his wife at a resort in the region. They quickly became friends, and Gorbachev and his wife Raisa regularly vacationed together with the Andropov’s in the resorts of the Caucus. Andropov would be decisive in Gorbachev’s rise to power. What made Gorbachev so appealing to powerful men like Kulakov and Andropov? Gorbachev was the opposite of the typical coarse, hard-drinking party functionary. He attended the elite Moscow University where he received a law degree. Gorbachev was well-read and could discuss Marxist-Leninist doctrine with the ease of an academic. He was moderate in his drinking, sophisticated, cultured and energetic. His wife Raisa was appealing and charming. In 1964 Kulakov was promoted to head the Central Committee’s Agriculture Department in Moscow.2 By 1971 he was a member of the Politburo and a close confidant of Leonard Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the CPSU.3 Kulakov did not forget Gorbachev. The two 2 Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The governing body of the CPSU 3 The highest policy making authority of CPSU 2 men kept in regular contact. In 1970 Gorbachev was selected the First Secretary of the Stavropol Region’s Communist Party with the assistance of Kulakov from Moscow. He was 39-years old when he was selected to be First Secretary. Gorbachev’s “youth” and “energy” would become an important factor in his rapid promotions through the ranks of the CPSU. First Secretary Gorbachev distinguished himself with the completion of several major projects including an irrigation canal project that brought water to Andropov’s village. In 1977 Kulakov asked for Gorbachev’s help in bringing in a record grain harvest in the Stavropol Region. Gorbachev successfully worked to ensure a record harvest was delivered to the state. General Secretary Brezhnev recognized Gorbachev as one of the “new young leaders” who had “big, statesman-like ideas about issues of national importance.” 4 In 1978 he was called to Moscow and appointed as Central Committee Secretary in charge of agriculture. Two years later he was a member of the Politburo whose members had a median age in the mid 70’s. They were the “Brezhnev Generation”, the political elite who rose to prominence during Stalin’s Great Purge. In November 1982 Leonard Brezhnev died almost a complete invalid after a series of strokes and heart attacks. He was immediately succeeded as General Secretary by Yuri Andropov, a member of the Politburo and head of the KGB, who also was very sick. In August 1983 Andropov entered a hospital with kidney failure where he remained until he died in January 1984. He made it clear he wanted Gorbachev to replace him as General Secretary but was outmaneuvered by party functionaries. In February 1984 he was followed as General Secretary by Konstantin Chernenko who was also sick with advanced emphysema, heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver. By the end of 1984 he could not leave his hospital room and died in March 1985. After three years of leadership by sick and dying old men (a commentator described them as “geriatric zombies”), the Party was ready for the youthful (54-years old) and energetic (not terminally ill) Mikhail Gorbachev. In March 1985 the Central Committee Plenum made him General Secretary of the CPSU. And so began the end of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin was born in the Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals and began his party career there. He studied construction engineering at a local Polytechnic. After graduating, he quickly 4 William Taubman, Gorbachev His Life and Times (New York, 2017) pp.130-132. 3 worked his way up the city of Sverdlovsk’s (renamed Yekaterinburg in 1991) bureaucracy for residential construction. Yeltsin accomplishments in meeting residential apartment construction targets came to the attention of Yakov Ryabov, a party functionary who became the First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Communist Party in 1971. Yeltsin had a reputation of being headstrong and abrasive. He was described as being high powered, assertive, and strong willed with a “nose for publicity”. In April 1968 Ryabov recruited him into the regional party apparatus. Ryabov had been told “He (Yeltsin) will carry out what leadership assigns him to do.”5 In 1976 Ryabov left for Moscow where he became the Central Committee secretary responsible for supervising the Soviet defense industry. Ryabov lobbied Brezhnev to replace him with Yeltsin. He believed Yeltsin had the “iron grip” and strong will needed to the job. In 1976, Yeltsin became First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Communist Party. Those who worked for Yeltsin when he was First Secretary later said his criteria for selecting party officials was good training, knowledge of work and devotion to him, Yeltsin. While in Moscow on party business he kept in regular contact with former officials from Sverdlovsk working in the Kremlin. 6. Yeltsin came the attention of Yuri Andropov, then Chairman of the KGB, when overnight in September 1977 he implemented the Politburo directive to raze the Ipat’ev House in the city of Sverdlovsk as part of a “planned reconstruction”. Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in the cellar of that house in 1918. Moscow was concerned the execution site was attracting both Soviet and foreign tourists and might become a shrine to the murdered Tsar.7 In January 1984, Andropov, now General Secretary CPSU, sent Yegor Ligachev, the organizational secretary for the Central Committee , to Sverdlovsk to “have a look” at Yeltsin. Ligachev was impressed by Yeltsin’s vigor and decisiveness. The First Secretary was a man who thought big and knew “how to get things done”.8 Ligachev proposed Yeltsin be appointed head of the Central Committee’s construction department. Andropov died though before the position was offered Yeltsin. When Gorbachev became General Secretary, 5 Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin A Life (New York, 2008) see pp. 68-75. 6 Colton, see pp. 77-84. 7 Colton, pp. 89-90. 8 Colton, p. 208. 4 Ligachev convinced him to bring Yeltsin to Moscow. Gorbachev knew Yeltsin and was “leery” of him. Yeltsin had squabbled with emissaries from the Central Committee’s Agricultural Committee concerning problems in Sverdlovsk. Gorbachev noted that Yeltsin had made an inadequate response to criticism from the Central Committee on agricultural problems. He had also seen a wobbly Yeltsin being helped out of a Supreme Soviet session on someone’s arm and thought Yeltsin had been drinking.
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